Coming Soon To A Theater Near You: Upcoming Releases of 2015 That The Archivis' Is Looking Forward To

Alo Party Peoples.

And a Happy New Year. That means its list making time, because that's how the Internet marks the beginning and end of things. You've already seen my favorite and worst lists, so today I'll be giving you a list of films that I'm looking forward to this year, but first there's something I have to clear up regarding how I date films on this site. I mentioned in my 2014 best list that to qualify a film had to have gotten a wide release by Christmas so you can have a chance to see it by the end of the year. That leaves a whole week in limbo, which is why as far as my dating is concerned the 26th' of December is the -6th' of January. Anyways, lets get to the movies, in order of release date...

• Selma (Jan. 9) This could not be a better time to release a biopic of Martin Luther King Jr. With recent events in Ferguson and New York City and the nationwide protests in response calling the achievements of the Civil Rights movement into question, what better way to remind the country that we have made progress, as hard as it can be to believe sometimes.
• Jupiter Ascending (Feb. 6) What's that? The Wachowskis are doing a big over the top space opera? And it looks like it jumped straight out of the pulp adventures of the 1950s' and put on a coat of state of the art effects on its way out the door? I'm on board, albeit hesitantly since this was pushed back from July of last year. 
• Insurgent (Mar. 20) I'm not joking, I'm actually looking forward to Divergent 2. Yes, the first one ended up on my worst of the year list, and I stand by that decision, but have you seen the trailer for this thing? Sure, it looks bad, but it also looks hilarious. They have a dude jumping over a train track and they slow it down like it's the most epic thing ever. The production design still looks like a TV movie from 2004. Shailene Woodley gets into a fight to the death with herself. Maybe this one will embrace the absurdity of its teenage melodrama and become something worth watching in a so-bad-it's-good way. 
• Avengers: Age of Ultron (May 1) So far Marvel Studios has yet to produce something I would call truly bad, and I doubt that the second Avengers film will. I like that it seems to be continuing the vein of post-9/11 allegory set by Iron Man 3 and Winter Soldier by using the robots as not-drones. I like that writer/director Joss Whedon is almost a big name now, and his talent for handling ensemble casts and writing natural banter has served him well with this section of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far.
• Paper Towns (June 5) Oh, look. Another movie based on a book by John Green. It looks like a lot of the same actors from Fault In Our Stars are returning, and Green himself worked on the screenplay. Awesome. Though I do wonder if his tendency to write all sorts of debauchery can be carried over on what will almost definitely be a PG-13. Then again, The Fault In Our Stars got away with underage drinking and sex with a PG-13, so Paper Towns will probably be just fine.
• Tomorrowland (May 22) The idea behind this film from Pixar veteran Brad Bird seems to be "What if there was a place where the vision of the future of the Sixties became reality? Wouldn't that be so much better and less depressing than the future that actually came to pass?" It looks kind of like a more optimistic take on some of Interstellar's posing the death of the space program as the death of human ambition. That sounds like a party to me, enough that I can ignore basing a movie on a theme park ride.
• Inside Out (June 19) Is it just me, or has Pixar declined from its old position as the gold standard of American animation? I'd say that since Toy Story 3 they've been turning out noble misfires, toothless fluff, and straight up bad movies, coincidentally at the same time everyone else started to catch up to their golden age. This looks like they might be able to make a comeback, I hope they do.
• Ant-Man (July 17) After their embarrassing breakdown in relations with Edgar Wright, I'm surprised that Marvel Studios is still going through with their Ant-Man project, but it looks like they've found a friend of his to make it instead. I'm really interested in seeing what the final result of this troubled production looks like.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Dec. 28) How could I not be interested in a new Star Wars project. I was as skeptical as anyone else when Disney bought Star Wars. I was just as irritated as anyone else when J.J. Abrams was given the director's chair. But now that we've actually seen some footage from it, I think this project might actually be in good hands. I especially like that he seems to have found a middle ground between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy in terms of visuals.

I hope these turn out well, and I still realize that most of my choices have a fanciful/fantastical bent to them. Part of my New Year's resolution is to broaden my horizons in that respect.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Into The Woods' (PG - Disney - 2 hrs, 4mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Rob Marshall
Written by James Lapine

It looks like Broadway musicals may soon become the new YA phenomenon. This holiday season we already had a remake of Annie (it was a pretty decent kids movie), and the spectacular disaster that was NBC's Peter Pan Live!, which came off as an unintentional adult spoof of itself. Now we have Into The Woods, which starts out as an upbeat light hearted comedy musical mash-up of various fairy tales, and for what it is, it isn't bad. In fact, it comes pretty close to getting a reccomendation, until it falls apart.

But first, our story. There's a town on the edge of the woods, in which James Corden and Emily Blunt live as a childless baker's family. One day they are approached by Meryl Streep as a witch that offers to give them a child in exchange for a cow, a cloak, some golden hair and a slipper. Fortunately for the baker, the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk are all going on at the same time as they embark on their little quest. Surely enough, hi-jinks ensue as their stories start to intersect.

If that sounds like an excuse for comedy bits involving a fairy tale mashup, that's because Into The Woods is exactly that. The whole thing plays out less like a feature film and more like a series of short scenes, this is probably a holdover from a medium-shift from the stage play, along with incredibly constrained cinematography hiding the more fantastical elements in the shadows. It seems to want to be a Monty Python movie, in fact this is probably something they could have hit out of the park, but the filmmakers are unable to stick that landing and instead of being intriguingly surreal, it comes off as a meandering slog.

Fortunately, the cast is pretty damn excellent. Meryl Streep is fantastic at hamming it up as the witch, James Corden and Emily Blunt are great at making the Baker family look in way over their heads, Johnny Depp and Lilla Crawford have bizarre chemistry as the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood respectively, Mackenzie Mauzy plays Rapunzel as a bit of a floozie to hilarious results, and they all elevate this to more than just a tepid musical.

Unfortunately, they can't save it from its meandering nature making the whole thing drag on, and on, and on. There is no reason for this to be two hours, it very easily could have been taken out in 90 minutes, and if it was I probably could have recommended this. Maybe this will one day become a cult classic ala Newsies or The Room, but for now Into The Woods suffers from a creative collapse and can be safely ignored.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Night At The Museum: Secret of the Tomb' (PG - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 38 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

The Night at the Museum franchise is one of those properties that I feel, in ten or so years when the Nostalgia Wave reaches the 21st' Century, will likely be one of the first things rebooted, and I would be all for it because the series isn't really all that special. The first one is a pretty good family film and has its moments, but it isn't the kind of story that lends itself to serialization. The sequel, Battle of the Smithsonian on the other hand, falls into the usual Would-Be-Franchise Trap of inflating the scope of the first one without any new perspective or interpretation being taken on the concept.

Said concept involves Ben Stiller as a night watchman at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The hook is that a magical Egyptian tablet housed there makes the exhibits come to life at night, and that should clue you into why this series shouldn't be a series, its the kind of idea that only works once before becoming stale. See also, Men in Black, Paranormal Activity, Final Destination, and a lot of other horror properties.

Anyways, the premise of Secret of the Tomb is that the magic bringing the exhibits to life is starting to break down, and that's a problem because it makes them go haywire in front of guests. Each installment of this series moves the action to a different museum, the Natural History museum in the first one, the Smithsonian in DC for the second one, and now the British Museum where the only person that knows how to fix the magic is one of the exhibits. Naturally, shenanigans ensue as the ensemble from the last two films, Stiller, the late Robin Williams as Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan as minatures of a frontier cowboy and a Roman soldier respectively, Rami Malek as an Egyptian king, Mizuo Peck as Sacagewea, a Capuchin monkey, and Patrick Gallagher as Atilla the Hun head across the pond with the tablet causing those exhibits start coming to life for the first time.

As you may have guessed from that lineup of characters, the thing this series exists for, or at least what some would find interesting about it, is getting a free-for-all mashup of various parts of history in one place, and figuring out what stuff like dinosaur skeletons, model aircraft, and statues would look life moving around and doing stuff. Unfortunately, they don't do anything with the various personalities on display. Take the cowboy and the Roman, both of their cultures were out on the frontier of Western civilization, and they were both operating to expand it. In the first film that led to conflict, but here they've managed a sort of bromance with eachother. As for the visuals, they do a good job, but nothing that the first one was able to do better.

It also keeps interrupting that mash-up with failed attempts at comedy via awkward dialogue exchanges that are trying to be Monty Python but come off more like bad public access improv. I probably wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't Robin Williams' last performance, and that aspect of it doesn't really provide much for me to talk about. He isn't especially good or especially bad, he's just sort of okay, exactly like the movie he's acting in.

As a fun distraction for your kids, Secret of the Tomb is nothing special. If your'e a parent with kids to entertain, take them to see Annie or Big Hero 6, or just save yourself some money and rent the first Night at the Museum instead.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 24 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens,
Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro

When I first heard that the subtitle of the final Hobbit movie was changed from There and Back Again to The Battle of the Five Armies, I feared that meant that said battle was all this movie would be. These movies have been a weird experiment. After having made fantasy viable blockbuster material with Lord of the Rings, could Peter Jackson and company live up to those monumental expectations while adapting Tolkien's much smaller and simpler earlier book?

The results have been, interesting. An Unexpected Journey worked fine as a fantasy adventure in its own right, and left me semi-hopeful as to the state of things to come. Desolation of Smaug on the other hand, was on average mediocre and downright bad in a lot of parts. I'm sure many of you who care about this series have seen or at least heard of the barrel scene by now, and it also stops in the middle of the climax. Seriously, you could not come up with a better joke about how drawn out this series is than the actual ending of Desolation of Smaug.

The Battle of the Five Armies opens with that climax (which, incidentally, is nowhere near long enough to justify tacking it onto this film) and the plot proper begins with its aftermath. Now that the dragon Smaug has been killed, the massive amount of gold he has been hoarding for sixty-odd years in the Lonely Mountain is now up for grabs. The company of dwarves we've been following during this series, or really just their nominal leader, claim it as their birthright. The human survivors of Smaug's attack on Laketown need it to finance rebuilding their community. An army of elves shows up to check dwarven power in the area and keep an army of orcs from taking the strategically important position, a different army of dwarves shows up because the dwarven leader happens to be the cousin of their king, all of these people end up coming to blows over the mountain leading to the battle of the title, which is drawn out over the entire movie.

I'll give Jackson this, he definitely knows how to make things look amazing, you can say that about all of these movies. He clearly at least cares about what he's making, and every frame becomes a painting under his direction and a crack team of set designers, costume and prop makers, and the best rendering software Hollywood money can buy. Unfortunately, all the visual panache in the world can't hide the fact that, at the end of the day, this series is what it always looked like, Peter Jackson taking a three movie victory jog after the monumental achievement that was Lord of the Rings by doing a studio financed fan film version of The Hobbit. I never expected these movies to measure up to what is probably still the best work of fantasy in film of the 21st' Century, even if it is possible to "top" that, you don't do it by adapting a simple story for children at bedtime, but there simply is not enough story there to stretch over a grand total of nine hours running time.

The Hobbit film trilogy has ended with a whimpering bang. I'm not exactly angry with these films, mostly I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that Jackson doesn't seem to know how to quit when he's ahead, that so much capital and talent went into a series, that in the end, is little more than a Middle-Earth themed amusement park ride. That being said, if all you want to see a huge fantasy battle manned by a cast of actors giving it their all, I suppose its worth a matinee.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: 'Annie' (PG - Sony Pictures - 1 hr, 58 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.



Directed by Will Gluck
Written by Will Gluck and
Aline Brosh McKenna

Just the idea of a 21st' Century version of Annie might make some people's skin crawl, and I can see why. A combination of cynical IP mining, and taking something lots of folks have nostalgic memories of and pumping it up with unnecessary modern updates seems like just the kind of thing I would hate. However, considering what low expectations something like this would have, the new Annie is a lighthearted, perfectly fine children's movie.

Annie is a plucky foster child living under a drunk deadbeat guardian that one day literally runs into Mr. Stacks, the head of a cellphone company running a failing campaign to become mayor of New York City, and he keeps her from getting hit by a van. Positive publicity from his apparent act of altruism convinces him it would be a good idea to take her in for a while to help his chances at the polls, the two start bonding over time, most of you reading this probably know the story, it doesn't diverge from the musical very much.

The primary 21st' Century update to this story is a predominantly black cast including Jamie Foxx as Mr. Stacks, and Quvenzhane Wallis as Annie. The two have believable chemistry together, mostly on Foxx's part. As for Wallis, well, I know I shouldn't be too hard on child actors, and she isn't exactly bad, but she doesn't seem to be able to convey an emotion other than childlike wonder, which is exactly what she needs to do for most of the movie, except in the climax when Stack's assistant finds a couple people to play Annie's long lost parents, and when she discovers the rouse she fails to express any real fear. Fortunately the rest of the cast really delivers, you already know Foxx is good in it, Cameron Diaz plays Miss Hannigan as a bizarre mix of Cruella de Vil and Ke$ha, and Rose Byrne as Stack's assistant is just fine.

The point of seeing this, and probably a big incentive in making it, was getting modern updates to the songs everyone remembers from the original, and said songs are alright. They move along at a good clip, its mostly upbeat pop versions of Hard Knock Life, Tomorrow, and they mostly don't offend. Are they chessey and over the top? Of course, but it isn't like the original wasn't. They more or less work.

The new Annie is about as good as one could expect a 21st' Century Annie to be. It moves along at a good clip, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and at the very least it isn't obnoxious, and with modern children's films that almost a miracle. You probably already know if your'e going to see this, if you have kids you probably don't have much of a choice, but know that it isn't a complete waste of time.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Exodus: Gods And Kings (PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 30 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage,
Jeffery Cain, and Steven Zaillian

What's the point in telling this story again? Not that it isn't worthy of the silver screen, it's definitely worked before, but the story of Moses is one of those stories that has been told and retold so many times that you have to either have some fresh, new perspective on it, or really hit it out of the park to make another version worthwhile. Ridley Scott, doesn't have the former and hasn't done the latter.

First, our scenario. Christian Bale as Moses, and Joel Edgerton as Ramses are brothers in the Egyptian royal family. Ramses grows up to take the throne as pharaoh, Moses discovers that he is the man prophesied to free the kingdom's population of Hebrew slaves, if you've heard this story enough times to already be bored, Ridley Scott probably agrees with you. He seems less interested in telling the story of Moses than he is in getting interesting visuals out of it, and while said spectacle is gorgeous, it doesn't make the dramatic scenes around it any more involving. Said dramatic scenes are universally badly acted, the performers clearly didn't get any direction from a man more interested in playing with the fancy computer generated toys.

You won't hear much comparison to Darren Aronofsky's Noah from earlier this year. Despite their source material coming from the same source, they're trying to be two completely different types of movies. Where Noah was a psychological character piece dressed up with the trappings of mythic fantasy, Exodus is much more of a straight forward epic, with the attendant lavishly constructed sets, costumes, and long tracking shots of monuments being built, massive crowds and armies moving from place to place, and FX driven recreations of the Plauges and the parting of the Red Sea.

I was somewhat interested to see how an agnostic man would interpret this story, but Scott holds fairly close to the Biblical version, which is an impressive feat of translation, but he of course makes some changes. Unfortunately, the changes he makes are, in every instance, either superficial or stupid or both. Instead of turning the Nile into blood, a bunch of crocodiles get into a feeding frenzy which makes the water sort of red, Moses and Ramses get into a jousting match in the middle of the Red Sea, God appears to Moses in the form of a little kid, which makes every scene where the two converse unintentionally hysterical. Oh, and Moses doesn't have a staff in this version, he has a sword. It's a special sword, in that it's one of a pair of special swords, and Ramses has the matching piece. I could not have made that up if I tried.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is dull except when it's stupid. I was hoping this would turn out well, but it's a failure as a spiritual film, as a drama, and it's visuals aren't original enough to work as crowd pleasing spectacle. I do not recommend it, if you really need to see this story again, rent The Ten Comandments, or The Prince of Egypt if you have kids to entertain, or just, you know, read the book.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

The Archivis' First Annual Thinking Man Awards (Films of 2014)

Alo Party Peoples.

Let me make a couple of things clear, first off, film making is not engineering. While technical execution is definitely something I notice and value, unlike some fans of certain other mediums I could name, it isn't my only criteria for whether something is good. That's why I don't give out numbered scores, I don't think one can boil complex subjective opinions about an art form down to a percentage. A prime example of this is Neill Blomkamp's Elysium from last year. From a technical perspective, it's amazing, the man knows how to wring every last drop of pathos from each expertly arranged shot, but his script was an awkward hard-left polemic about U.S. immigration policy that had no emotional center, and the production falls flat as a result.

Also, this isn't a list of the best movies of 2014, and that's for a couple of reasons. One of which is that I didn't see every movie to come out this year, critical darlings such as Gone Girl or Snowpiercer, and likely Academy Award front-runners like Boyhood or Birdman are productions that I heard a lot of good things about, but haven't seen for one reason or another. This is a list of my favorite movies that I did see this year, because quality is in the eye of the beholder. There are things that I really enjoyed this year that I know some of my readers despised, but I promised myself that I would be honest in my appraisal, because otherwise I would be doing you, my readers, a disservice. Enough from me, lets get to the part you came here for. The only criteria is that it has to have had a wide release by Christmas so you can see it by the end of the year. First up, the runners up and stuff that didn't meet the release criteria. In no particular order...

• Earth To Echo: Director Dave Green and writer Henry Gayden went and made E.T. for the Digital Age on more than a superficial level, and I fully expect that this movie will take E.T's place among the digital generation, or Net-generation, or Post-Millenials, or whatever we decide to call the generation born after 2003. If you have children that age and need a Christmas gift for them, go with this movie, they'll love it.
• Edge of Tomorrow: Most people didn't see this Doug Liman directed action flick in theaters, enough for Warner Bros. to re-brand it Live, Die, Repeat when it got to home media, but now's your chance to catch up. It's the best Tom Cruise movie in years, the Mass Effect/Halo/Call of Duty inspired visuals are amazing, and they compliment a screenplay that successfully uses video game mechanics to tell an engaging story in a non-interactive medium.
• 22 Jump Street: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two of the best comedians working in Hollywood today, hit another one out of the park with the sequel to their 2011 hit 21 Jump Street, an in-name only adaptation of a mostly forgotten 1980s' cop show was a fantastic comedy, and also a meta-commentary on the nature of comedy sequels. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum continue to be a fantastic comic duo, make sure to watch through the credits.
• Foxcatcher: A fantastic actor's showcase, and a superb work of dark, foreboding atmosphere courtesy of director Bennett Miller. I fully expect Steve Carrel and Channing Tatum to get Oscar nominations for their roles.
• The Zero Theorem: Are you looking for a 21st' Century take on the themes and ideas of The Matrix? Did Lucy look promising in that regard, but disappoint you with it's pretentious insanity? Then I've got the movie for you. Director Terry Gilliam's sets are gorgeous, Christoph Waltz is amazing in it, and it serves as a fascinating look into the paradoxically interconnected yet isolating nature of our wired, information saturated, post-Digital world. Definitely worth checking out if you can find it.
• Life Itself: A fantastic documentary chronicling the life of the late Roger Ebert, the man you can thank for film critics being anything more than just that guy who writes about movies in the newspaper. Probably soon to become mandatory viewing in film classes.

And now...

The Archivis' Top Seven Favorite Movies of 2014

#7) Noah Directed and Written by Darren Aronofsky

Distributed by Paramount
Pictures

Even before seeing Noah, I knew that it would be a polarizing film, just because of its source material. That the actual film depicted the titular Noah as an insane radical willing to let all of humanity die in keeping to his interpretation of the Creator's (the movie never uses the word 'god', another point of contention) plans made that even more apparent. Sure enough, I had plenty of discussion with my devout Christian father about it, and I can completely understand feeling that Darren Aronofsky is spitting on holy writ. However, I was looking at it through a secular lense as a fantasy movie, and in that light, Noah is at once an environmentalist polemic, a fantastic visual effects showcase, a chilling character study, and a stunning epic. With so many disparate parts, it shouldn't be able to work, but just out of sheer artistic effort, it does. The only reason it isn't any higher is that the sort of barely controlled madness on display is on the verge of reaching Lucy levels of pretentiousness. If you've seen either movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about.


#6) The Lego Movie Directed and Written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller

Distributed by
Warner Bros.

No, you haven't taken leave of your senses, I'm being serious. I can't believe it either, but The Lego Movie was far better than it had any right or reason to be. It's easy to look at this as symbolizing the final victory of Corporate Hollywood and the culmination of the Franchise Age, and it is a symbol of that, but it's also a good movie in spite of that. Besides the breathtakingly detailed animation and fantastic voice cast, what really made The Lego Movie able to transcend its origins as a pumped up toy commercial and become something truly special was a lively, funny, and even intelligent script about the dissonance between Lego as a creative tool and the way that Lego sells its product from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the best in the business at turning stupid ideas into good final products.


#5) Interstellar Directed by Christopher Nolan, Written by Johnathan Nolan

Distributed by
Warner Bros./Paramount

This was the movie that I was looking forward to more than any other this year, and it certainly delivered in a lot of ways. Christopher Nolan's decades spanning space epic was a lot of things. At once an IMAX show reel of gorgeous spaceflight sequences, a condemnation, albiet out of date, of the abandonment of manned space travel, the most human feeling film that Nolan has made to date, and one of the most hard science adhering blockbusters ever. That's, like a list of things that will potentially get your movie in my good graces, enough that I can't put it any higher out of fear that it's pandering to my sweet spots, and also some wonky-ness in the third act including "experimental" sound mixing that occasionally drowns out dialogue in such a way that, no joke, I thought was the result of an inexperinced projectionist not knowing how to work with 70 mm film.


#4) The Fault In Our Stars Directed by Josh Boone, Written by Scott Neustader and Micheal H. Weber

Distributed by
20th Century Fox

John Green is a man that I respect a good deal, but he's also a pretty weird dude that writes some pretty offbeat books. So I was thus interested to see how one of them would work on the silver screen. It turns out that, at least this one, becomes a sweet, immensely watchable romantic comedy that still manages to capture the gravity of it's subject matter. This is after all a movie about teenagers dying of cancer. Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort have fantastic chemistry, director Josh Boone gives it a fun, indie-vibe charm, and unlike pretty much every other YA movie that I saw this year, the people making it actually gave a s*** about something other than their bottom line, and tried to make the best movie possible. Even if it wasn't a charming little production, that alone would get it in my good graces.



#3) Guardians of the Galaxy Directed by James Gunn, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman

Distributed by
Marvel/Disney

I know that it might seem odd to put a big ridiculous action movie from Marvel/Disney above Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan, but hot damn, Guardians of the Galaxy is just a wonderful time at the movies. James Gunn, a veteran of the indie scene for years before getting this shot at the big leauges, made a gleefully irreverent action-comedy that also works as a pulp space opera in the vein of the original Star Wars or The Fifth Element that feels almost, well, alien in a grim, self-serious 21st' Century blockbuster scene. The assembled cast have fantastic chemistry with one another, every frame is bursting with imagination, and it's a welcome change of pace.




#2) Captain America: The Winter Soldier Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Written by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, and Ed Brubaker

Distributed by
Marvel/Disney

This is the best Marvel Studios movie to date. Not only is it a good action movie, and to be clear Winter Soldier is a great action movie, with excellent fight choreography and visual effects, but it has the confidence in itself to tackle the big problem, at least from a marketing standpoint, with using this character in a modern setting. i.e. you can't not get political with a character named after a country that wears its flag as a uniform, especially the United States these days. It does this by continuing the vein of post-9/11 allegory that has permeated much of Marvel's Phase 2 release cycle, taking on the myriad of issues relating to NSA wiretapping and casting it's hero in the role of Edward Snowden in Star Spangled Spandex, a bold move, and they manage to pull it off without coming off as preachy.




#1) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Directed by Matt Reeves, Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver 

Distributed by
20th Century Fox

Screen Junkies summed up the appeal of the current Planet of the Apes series really well in their Honest Trailer of Dawn with the following words. "Settle in for the thinking man's summer blockbuster, chock full of; complicated characters, political maneuvering, family dynamics, and a monkey dual-wielding machine guns on horseback fighting a tank!" This is the best kind of mass entertainment, pulling of the miraculous feat of being both a smart, compelling work of big idea sci-fi drama, and a crowd pleasing spectacle at the same time, what one critic called "the antithesis of what we're usually asked to accept in the middle of summer". It's fantastically acted, intelligently written, and a viscerally thrilling action movie. Easily the best of this summer, and my favorite movie of the year.

Before we go, here are some observations about this year in movies.

• This is the year that Captain America was a better spy thriller than Jack Ryan.
• This year was the return of the Biblical epic to mainstream movie going.
• We learned that the ladies can open a movie, that the Marvel Studios name can open a movie, but that Tom Cruise evidently cannot.
• We learned that the profiting-off-nostalgia wave has reached the Nineties.
• This was the year that showed the YA movie trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
• This was the year that Sony was crippled by a malware attack that was almost definitely North Korea over The Interview, a movie about assassinating Kim Jong Un. If that isn't a testament to the power of cinema, I don't know what is.

That was fun, and it isn't lost on me that most of my choices have a somewhat fanciful/fantastical bent to them. Part of that is personal interest, and part of it is that a lot of studio output is genre material these days, and has been since Star Wars ushered in the modern blockbuster. For context on my choices, you can see a list of the movies that I saw this year here, and for my worst list you can go here. Happy New Year, my readers, let's hope for some more gems in 2015.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

The Archivis' First Annual Not Buster "Awards" (Worst of 2014)

Alo Party Peoples

I know this seems a bit premature, but two things. 1) Wild, the Reese Witherspoon hiking to conquer addiction movie doesn't seem to be playing in my area yet, (though I've heard good things about it), and 2) there is no way that I will see anything worse than number one before Christmas. Let's get to the show, but first, some dishonorable mentions.

• Lucy: Dangerously close to ending up on the list proper, Scarlet Johannson is fantastic as always, she and a top notch visual effects team keep it from total failure, but they cannot save a disjointed, pretentious, out of control production that resembles the action movie version of Cosmos.
• The Maze Runner: From sparse ugly sets, to a pointless third act reveal, to wooden performances all around, I had to check twice and make sure this wasn't an M. Night. Shyamalan gig. I know how serious a remark that is, and I'm sticking with it.

Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Written by Adam Cozad
and David Koepp

#5) Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

How do you take a character who's origins are inherently tied into the politics of the late 20th Century and the Cold War and make them work in a post-9/11 21st Century setting? Not like this. Paramount Pictures' attempt to retrofit the late Tom Clancy's spy hero into a Bourne-esque super soldier/potential reliable franchise  resulted in a dull, washed out slog of an action movie, and an inept failure of a smart espionage thriller, with both elements undermining each other. I don't expect we'll be seeing this version of Jack Ryan from this forgotten dud again any time soon.

Directed by R. J. Cutler
Written by Shauna Cross

#4) If I Stay

What could have been a smart little idea for a slow burning, meditative mood piece and an actor's showcase, an out of body experience of a woman in critical condition in the ER slowly watching her equally critical family die around her, was unforgivably wasted by attaching it to a twee, indie rock infused, completely un-involving teenybopper romance story. Like I said in my review of it "If I Stay feels like half of a really good movie spliced together with a thoroughly mediocre one."



#3) Pompeii 3D

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Written by Janet Scott Batchler
Lee Batchler and Micheal R. Johnson

This is an actual thing that exists. For something as inherently cheesy sounding as the doomed romance disaster movie version of Pompeii, this dead zone entry fizzled out in a show of restraint forced on it by a PG-13 rating and a Valentines Day release date.. If your'e going to make this concept, then go all out. Make the blood pop, the sleazy stuff something you wouldn't show your mother, but no, we got a safe, sterile version of what could have been worth a matinee.





#2) Divergent

Directed by Neil Burger
Written by Evan Daugherty and
Vanessa Taylor

In a year that was positively awash in bad YA movies, this wasn't the worst, we'll get to it, but this was the one that got under my skin the most. The production design, beyond cheap, all of it looks like it was shot in abandoned warehouses and office buildings that they didn't have to pay rent for. The acting, boring and pointless, even from Shailene Woodley who has shown herself to be capable of emoting elsewhere. The script, lazy, pandering garbage that frames it's dark future in terms of high school social cliques only made slightly interesting in that it's the Jock tribe rather than the Nerd tribe painted as heroes, but is otherwise insulting in how much it laser focuses itself on the wallets of insecure teenagers.


#1) The Giver

Directed by Philip Noyce
Written by Micheal Mitnik and
Robert B. Weide

I am confident in saying that The Giver is the worst movie I saw this year. Not because of it's politics, not because of it's market niche, but because it is an inept failure of a production. When I first heard that The Giver was going to be a movie, I saw a slight glimmer of hope, but then the first trailer hit and I realized that the book Hunger Games was drawing from was being turned into a lazy cash-in on the Hunger Games movies. From production design stolen from a Build Your Own Fascist State Kit, to lazy use of monochrome that completely misses the point of why the Lois Lowry used monochrome in the book, to phoned in performances from every member of the cast save a constantly mumbling Jeff Bridges, to a climax and resolution that resemble the end of a late 20th Century video game more than a feature film, and visual effects to match, this was a disaster. What a letdown.



Let's hope for a better crop in 2015.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

The title of today's article was suggested by Olivia from the RDA chat. Thanks for being a reader.